IE 9, Windows Phone in the Mix

Monday Mar 15th 2010 by -

Share:

MIX 10 kicks off today!

The three-day Las Vegas event kicks off on today, with Windows Phone executive Joe Belfiore talking about the new phone operating system. On Tuesday, Internet Explorer head Dean Hachamovitch is slated to talk IE 9 and hopefully will offer some actual code this time. Microsoft provided a brief glimpse of IE 9 in November last year, highlighting its ability to use hardware acceleration for improved text and graphics rendering.

The XNA Framework, an implementation of the .Net, and its associated tools, also are likely to be part of the mix. Given the XNA Game Studio already supports Xbox 360, as well as the Zune media player,  and Windows Phone 7 borrows so liberally from the Zune HD, in terms of its user interface)  it makes sense XNA tools will support Windows Phone 7.

Although Microsoft hasn't gone into much detail about the tools needed to write Silverlight apps for Windows Phone 7 Series, the company did say at this week's Game Developer Conference in San Francisco that writing XNA games for Windows Phone will require the new version 4.0 of the XNA Game Studio. The company also confirmed that games can be hardware accelerated, connect to Xbox Live and bring in a user's gamertag, achievements and avatar.